The Berggruen Prize

The Berggruen Institute seeks to identify and nurture new ideas that have the potential to shape a better human future. We are committed to science as a source of knowledge and innovation and to philosophy as a source of critical perspective and deeper understanding of the place and role of humanity in the world.

Each year we offer the Berggruen Prize, a $1 million award that recognizes humanistic thinkers whose ideas have helped us find direction, wisdom, and improved self-understanding in a world being rapidly transformed by profound social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change.

While modernity has produced a dramatic expansion of knowledge, it has not delivered a commensurate increase in our understanding of our shared human condition. We believe that philosophy, broadly understood as the disciplined intellectual pursuit of wisdom, has a key role to play in making our complex reality more comprehensible and to prepare us to make wiser choices about our future.

Onora Sylvia O’Neill, Baroness of O’Neill of Bengarve is the winner of the 2017 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture. Her work has elevated the quality of public life and improved the very vocabulary of public discourse. I am pleased that this important citizen philosopher has been awarded this year’s Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture,” stated Institute Founder and Chairman Nicolas Berggruen.

Last year’s inaugural recipient of the Berggruen Prize was the distinguished Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, whose work urges us to see humans as constituted not only by their biology or their personal intentions, but also by their existence within language and webs of meaningful relationships.

The Berggruen Institute welcomes nominations of thinkers whose ideas have both intellectual depth and long-term social and practical value across nations and cultures.

Kwame Anthony Appiah – Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York UniversityLeszek Borysiewicz – Vice Chancellor of the University of CambridgeAntonio Damasio – Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern CaliforniaAmy Gutmann – President of the University of Pennsylvania Amartya Sen – Nobel Laureate, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard UniversityAlison Simmons – Professor of Philosophy at Harvard UniversityMichael Spence – Nobel Laureate, Professor of Economics & Business at New York UniversityWang Hui – Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University George Yeo – Former Foreign Minister of Singapore

Berggruen Prize: Jury Statement on Onora O’Neill

The jury is delighted to recognize Onora O’Neill as an exemplary Berggruen laureate; someone who meets impeccably the Prize’s aim to honor a philosopher “whose ideas have helped us find direction, wisdom, and improved self-understanding in a world being rapidly transformed by profound social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change.”

Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, is one of the most eminent moral philosophers in the world today. Her philosophical work is a critical development of the Kantian tradition in ethics, in which she combines profound historical scholarship with a deep analysis of the central questions of moral life. Indeed, she can claim to be one of a small group of philosophers who began the modern resurrection of that tradition and have given it resonance in our present age. She has argued persuasively that moral principles must be not just applied but enacted, that duties are more fundamental than rights, and that mutual trust provides the necessary background for autonomous human lives. Her philosophical work on these issues has been deeply original, enormously influential, and of the highest quality.

Professor O’Neill is also exceptional in combining pure theory—particularly, but not solely, of the Kantian kind—with its practical enactment. As a result, her service has been both intellectual and political. She has brought the resources of philosophy to bear on questions about hunger, medical and environmental ethics, and human rights, writing lucidly and accessibly about them in ways that have helped to guide policy. But she has also served the United Kingdom as the chair of its Equality and Human Rights Commission, as chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and as a member of the Human Genetics Advisory Commission, all of which play central roles in formulating and implementing just policy. Her scholarly excellence has been recognized through appointments as the President of the British Academy, as the founding President of the British Philosophical Association, and as the current President of the Society for Applied Philosophy. Her public service has been acknowledged by many civil honors, in Britain and elsewhere, including appointment to the House of Lords.

Berggruen juror Amy Gutmann, who chaired the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, observed: “One of the most striking aspects of Onora O’Neill’s work is that it combines philosophical rigor with timely prescriptions for what we really need to do to make the human condition better.”

Many of Onora O’Neill’s numerous books have had profound significance for the major public issues of our time:

• Faces of Hunger (1986) developed a Kantian approach to questions of international distributive justice and clarified moral obligation to those suffering famine.

• Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics (2002) challenged prevailing explanations of informed consent in medicine, showed that the Kantian notion of principled autonomy provided a better account of the wrongness of coercion and deception, and led to new articulations of the rights of patients and research subjects.

• The Bounds of Justice (2000) rejected the idea that the boundaries of nations set the bounds of our political and economic obligations, and argued influentially that national borders, too, must meet standards of justice; a project continued in

• Justice Across Boundaries: Whose Obligations (2016), which argued that we need to ensure that international human rights are secured by identifying groups, including states and other agencies, that have the obligation of protecting them.

• A Question of Trust (2002), which originated as O’Neill’s Reith Lectures, distinguished between trust and trustworthiness in ways now important to debates on the political and other implications of new media.